Notes on Apartment Life

ON ENCOUNTERING THE LINE "I long to ride the wind home / but fear those
coral towers and jade domes / for high places are unbearably cold," the majority of apartment dwellers who live on the top floor might well feel a shudder of recognition run down their spines.' The higher the apartment, the colder. Ever since the price of coal went up, radiators have become purely decorative. The "H" on the hot water tap may be an indispensable feature of a bathroom's design, but as things stand now, if you mistakenly turn on the hot water instead of the cold, a series of wails and hollow thumps emerges from the "Nine Springs" of the netherworld somewhere down below. That is the sound of the apartment building's terribly complicated and capricious hot water system losing its temper. Even if you don't engage in deliberate provocation, this god of thunder might well make an appearance at any time. It comes at you out of nowhere with an evil, elongated buzz followed by two blasting sounds, exactly like an airplane circling over the roof of the building before dropping two bombs. Having lost my courage in the terror of wartime Hong Kong, this sound used to throw me into a panic when I first got back to Shanghai. Early on, the pipes still went about their work conscientiously, laboriously transporting hot water up to the sixth floor, where it arrived with a gurgle or two. That was easily for‑
'The line derives from Su Shi's (1037-1101) famous Song dynasty lyric set to the melody "Shuidiao gefou" (Song for the river tune)-
 given. But nowadays there is loud thunder but very little rain, and we are lucky if we get two drops of rusty yellow mud . . . but there isn't much else I can say; the unemployed fly so easily off the handle.
In the rainy season, because tall buildings exert too much pressure on the ground and the foundation sinks into the topsoil, the deepest puddles are clustered right around the front entrance. The street will be completely dry, but we still have to spend money hiring rickshaws to cross the vast and misty moat that rings the building. When there is too much rain, the apartment itself will flood. We take turns coming to the rescue, using old towels, burlap bags, and sheets to block up the cracks in the window. When these things get wet through, we wring them out and put them back, squeezing the dirty water into wash basins and then pouring it into the toilet. After two days and two nights of work, a whole layer of skin has been rubbed off our palms, but water still pools at the base of the walls, and the patterned wall-paper is dappled with water stains and spots of mildew.
If the wind is not blowing in our direction, however, rain at the top of a tall building is actually quite lovely. One day, it rained around dusk. I had forgotten to close the windows on my way out, and when I came home and opened the front door, the apartment was full of the sound of wind and the smell of rain, so I looked out the window. It was a deep blue, raindrop-spattered night, with a few pale lamps swaying in the distance. Most of the houses had yet to turn on their lights.
I am often astounded by how extraordinarily clearly one can hear street noises from the sixth floor, as if it was all happening right beneath one's ears, resembling the way people's memories of trivial incidents from their childhood become increasingly clear and close the older and more distant they become.
I like to listen to city sounds. People more poetic than I listen from their pillows to the sound of rustling pines or the roar of ocean waves, while I can't fall asleep until I hear the sound of streetcars. On the hills in Hong Kong, it was only in the winter when the north wind blew all night long through the evergreens that I was reminded of the charming cadence of a streetcar. People who have lived their entire lives amid the bustle of the city do not realize what exactly they cannot do without until they have left. The thoughts of city people unfold across a striped curtain. The pale white stripes are streetcars in motion, moving neatly in parallel, their streams of sound flowing continuously into subconscious strata.
Our apartment is near the streetcar depot, but I've never been able to tell exactly what time the streetcars come home. The phrase "streetcars coming home" doesn't seem quite right: everybody knows that streetcars are soul-less machines and that the words "coming home" practically overflow with
 sentimental associations. But have you ever actually seen the strange spectacle of streetcars going into their garage? One car after another, like small children waiting in line, noisy, squealing, hoarse bells happily sounding out: "cling, clang, cling, clang." Amid the noise, a sense of a docility born of exhaustion, like children before bedtime waiting for their mothers to help them wash up. The lights in the streetcars shine bright white. Vendors who specialize in selling to streetcar ticket collectors coming off the late shift call out as they hawk loaves of bread. Every once in a while, when all the street-cars have gone inside, a single one is left parked outside, mysteriously, as if it had been abandoned in the middle of the street. Seen from above, its exposed white belly gleams in the moonlight in the depths of the night.
The vendors around here rarely sell any particularly fancy snacks. Nor have we ever lowered a basket out the window to the street to buy things from them. (Which reminds one of Violet Koo in the movie Nong ben chiging [I'm a fool for you]. She makes a rope out of silk stockings, attaches a paper box to the end, and lowers it out the window to buy noodle soup. No real silk stockings could ever survive such an ordeal! In the current climate of rationing and "resource conservation," this is a shocking extravagance that sets one's pulse racing). Maybe we should try lowering a basket to the street. Every time we hear the vendor who sells stinky tofu coming down the street, we have to grab a bowl, race down six flights of steps, give chase down the street, and, having finally located our man several long blocks away and made our purchase, take the elevator back home. All this seems faintly ridiculous.
Our elevator man is a real character, well read and erudite, of rare cultivation, a man who keeps meticulous tabs on the comings and goings of each family in the building. He doesn't approve of his son becoming a ticket collector on a streetcar because it's not a sufficiently classy profession. On even the hottest of days, no matter how urgently someone is ringing the electric buzzer, he still insists on donning a neatly ironed silk vest over his sleeveless undershirt before emerging from his room. He refuses to operate the elevator for visitors who dress sloppily. His thinking may incline too much toward the outmoded ideals of the traditional gentry, but at least he thinks. True, he leaves his little room only to step into the little room of an elevator. One fears that his whole existence will be consumed shuttling back and forth between these two cells. As the elevator rises, layer after layer of darkness shifts past the L-shaped brass grillwork of the gate: brown dark-ness, reddish brown darkness, darkest darkness, and, set against these alternations of darkness, the grizzled head of the elevator operator.
When he has a moment off, he goes to the back courtyard and cooks stir-fried dishes and griddle cakes on a little coal-burning stove. He taught us
 how to cook wild red rice: after the rice comes to a boil, kill the flame, and let it sit for ten minutes before continuing. What results is rice that is soft, cooked through, but not the least mushy or lacking in texture.
I once asked him to buy soy milk for us and gave him a used milk bottle for that purpose. After having made these purchases by proxy for two weeks, he rather matter-of-factly reported: "The bottle's gone." Whether it was broken or merely stolen, we didn't know. A little later on, he brought us a slightly smaller bottle full of soy milk: "Oh? The bottle's back?" He replied: "It's back." We could never ascertain whether this new bottle was meant to compensate us for the lost one or was merely on loan. These sorts of incidents have something of a socialistic tinge to them.
He invariably glances through the Xinwen bao (Daily news) before delivering it to our apartment every morning. He must read the tabloids rather more carefully, for we rarely get to see them before eleven or twelve noon. He doesn't read the English, Japanese, German, or Russian papers, which is why, bright and early each morning, they are rolled up and stuck in the crook above everyone's doorknobs.
No one steals the papers, but the metal facing over the doorbells was once pried off and taken away. There are actually two guards responsible for securing the front entrance. They are not twins, but they seem to share the same sawdusty yellow faces sticking out above button-down collars and sawdusty yellow knees sticking out between their shorts and the tops of their high socks. They doze on wicker chairs in front of the mailboxes during their shift. Whenever you want to check the mail, they block the way so that you must solicitously push your face close to theirs, as if to enquire whether their acne has shown any improvement lately.
Perhaps only women can fully appreciate the advantages of apartment life: the problem of hired help becomes much less pressing. The cost of living is high, and even if you can afford a maid, you have to prepare for her to be annoyed by your shortcomings. Domestic life is a relatively simple matter in an apartment. You can arrange for a company to come by once every two weeks and do a thorough cleaning, thus eliminating the need for hired help. Not having to have a maid is one of the best things in life. Leaving any notions of the ideal of equality aside, it's terribly annoying, if not utterly ruinous in terms of one's appetite, to have someone who has not yet eaten standing over you and watching as you eat at mealtimes, always at the ready to give you more rice. There are so many little chores that are inherently pleasurable to perform. If you can't see eggplants growing in a garden, it's almost as lovely to see them at the vegetable market: a purple so very complex and so glossy placed next to pale green new peas, ruby ripe
 peppers, and golden yellow gluten shining like soap bubbles in the sun. Every time one washes spinach and drops it into the wok, there are always one or two broken leaves stuck to the bottom of the bamboo basket, and no matter how hard you shake, they refuse to budge. In the light, the fresh emerald leaves displayed against the rectangular weave of the basket call to mind snow pea flowers on a trellis. And why must we call other things to mind at all? Isn't the beauty of the basket itself sufficient? None of this is intended as a display of my fealty to the National Socialist Party and its efforts to coax women back into the kitchen.2 There is so little point in coaxing, and if one must coax, it would only be right to urge men into the kitchen for a visit as well. Obviously, when people who have hired a cook start to hang around the kitchen, they will be looked on with some distaste. We must be careful not to infringe upon the prerogatives of our betters.
Sometimes, one also feels rather acutely the bitterness of life without help. There were weevils in the rice crock, so I sprinkled white pepper inside: apparently weevils do not appreciate the pungent aroma, and you can remove the peppercorns before soaking the rice. I mistook the head of a fat weevil for a peppercorn and squeezed it between my fingers. Once I realized my mistake, I could not help letting out an appropriately dismayed squeal, dropping the pot, and running away. In fact, when I saw a snake in Hong Kong once, it was much the same. All I saw of that snake was his upper half, stretching to a height of nearly two feet, just after it had slithered from out of a hole. I was holding a stack of books as I walked rapidly down a hill when I came face to face with it. It gazed quietly at me and I gazed quietly back, and it was only after a long pause that I screamed, turned, and fled.
Speaking of insects, there are hardly any flies up on the sixth floor, but every so often a few mosquitoes do make an appearance. If they were endowed with the slightest bit of imagination, surely they would faint dead away upon flying to the window and looking down to the ground far below? Unfortunately, these mosquitoes are all too similar to the English in their indifference and self-satisfaction. Even in the jungles of Africa, an Englishman still wears tails to dinner.
An apartment is an ideal retreat from the world outside. Often, people
who are weary of metropolitan life yearn for the quiet harmony of the countryside, longing for the day when they might retire to their old country home, keep bees, plant a few crops, and enjoy a well-earned rest. Little do
2Chang is referring here to a right-wing Chinese political party that was established in 1937 after the outbreak of the war with Japan, not its German namesake.
 they know that in the countryside the mere purchase of a half pound of smoked meat elicits storms of idle gossip, whereas in an apartment on the top floor, you can change clothes right in front of the window without any-one knowing the difference!
Even so, the secrets of everyday life must be made public at least once a year. In the summer, each and every family throws its doors wide and brings rattan chairs out into the hallway to take the breeze. Someone over there is talking on the telephone. The servant boy across the hall is ironing some clothes as he translates the telephone conversation into German for the benefit of his little master. There is a Russian man downstairs noisily giving Japanese lessons. The woman on the second floor seems to be locked in mortal combat with Beethoven, gritting her teeth as she repeatedly pummels the piano, against which a bicycle is precariously propped. Someone somewhere is making beef stew, and someone else simmering a Chinese herbal brew that counters indigestion.
Mankind is naturally inclined to mind other people's business. Why shouldn't we take the occasional stealthy glance at one another's private lives, if the person being looked at suffers no real damage and the one who looks is afforded a moment of pleasure? In matters involving the provision and procurement of pleasure, there's no need to be overly fussy. What, in the end, is there to fuss about? Misery endures, but life is short.
The kids in the building sometimes go roller-skating in the roof garden, and when they get excited, the scrape of the wheels moving back and forth across the ceiling goes on from morning to evening, sounding like nothing so much as dishes rasping against each other or a sleeper steadily grinding his teeth, setting your own teeth on edge, like the sour little pips of a green pomegranate, ready to drop to the ground with a flick of a finger. The foreign gentleman next door rushes furiously up the stairs to give them a piece of his mind. His wife warns: "They won't understand what you're saying, anyway. It's a waste of time." He balls his fists and rolls up his sleeves: "No matter. I'll make them understand." A few minutes later, he descends the stairs with the wind knocked out of his sails. The kids upstairs aren't so young anymore, and they're female, and they are pretty.
Speaking of public-spiritedness and morality, we cannot really claim to be any better than anyone else. We sweep the dust on our balcony down to the balcony below us without the slightest hesitation. "Oh, they've put their carpet out to dry on the railing. It would be such a shame to dirty it. Let's wait until they take it back in before we sweep." One kind thought such as this, and a glimmering halo materializes around one's head. This, then, is our not-so-very thorough sense of ethics.